The brief

With a vast and rapidly changing inventory of properties available to market online, ForRent.com needed a fast and scalable way to cover relevant user queries for every location and property featured on the website.

The rental destination was also looking for new ways to lower its cost-per-lead. With help from paid search partner agency Jellyfish, ForRent.com turned to Dynamic Search Ads.

The client set the following objectives:

To expand online reach at scale

To achieve higher return on investment

To drive more conversions

The solution

In response to the brief, the team here at Jellyfish completed the following;

Implemented DSAs in a three-month test

Combined DSAs with remarketing lists for Search ads

Invested 17% of AdWords budget in DSAs in 2015

DSA helped ForRent.com reach customers with the right information in the moments they were searching—without the need to manage keywords.

DSA indexed the company’s website to determine which searches to show ads for. If a search was relevant to the content on the site, Google automatically created an ad to enter into the auction. The ads’ headlines and landing pages were generated based on the products and services ForRent.com offered, as well as what people were searching for. These highly targeted ads complemented other AdWords campaigns by delivering value for relevant searches that weren’t covered by existing keywords.

DSA also organized ForRent.com’s content into recommended categories for targeting its ads. Recommended categories were customized to its products and services and triggered ads for search queries where ForRent.com had a relevant landing page. Each category was also refined to show additional, more specific categories.

DSA is a very intuitive and efficient tool that allows us to capture long-tail search terms. We’re able to increase coverage of these searches while generating the best ad copy and landing page for a specific user.

Terry Slattery President, ForRent.com

Market testing leads to increased DSA campaign spend

ForRent.com and Jellyfish began by running DSA test campaigns in a few markets during the first quarter of 2015.

When their test showed significantly increased visibility for specific properties and broader coverage across long-tail search terms, the rental website gradually increased its DSA campaign spending to 17% of its overall AdWords budget.

As its investment increased, its cost-per-lead decreased, leading the website’s marketing team to quickly build more DSA campaigns to cover all of the markets served by ForRent.com. The home search website also took advantage of remarketing campaigns to achieve greater exposure for more specific searches.

Performance has been so strong that the website’s DSA campaigns now drive 22% of its AdWords leads.

DSA drives clicks, drops costs

ForRent.com’s use of DSA campaigns delivered a marked improvement in performance compared to the website’s standard AdWords campaigns:

Click-through rates increased by 26%, CPCs decreased by 30%, and CPAs decreased by 37%. Performance has been so strong that the website’s DSA campaigns now drive 22% of its AdWords leads.

With help from Jellyfish, ForRent.com looks forward to taking further advantage of DSA’s auto-targeting features to drive more leads from interested renters at scale.